


let's try it again

by spacenarwhal



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boys In Love, M/M, Moving On, Mutual Pining, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 07:30:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacenarwhal/pseuds/spacenarwhal
Summary: Mike cracks It’s rotten heart in his hands and Richie could care less that the hellscape under Derry is crumbling all around them, he’s not leaving Eddie here, not alone, and if the others don’t agree they can leave him too. He’s done forgetting.“I’ve got him, Rich. I’ve got him.” And then Ben’s crouching and picking Eddie up like he weighs nothing, and Eddie’s head lolls like it isn’t properly attached at the neck and Richie sags, knees going to jelly so suddenly it takes all of Mike and Bill’s strength for them not to hit the ground together. “I’ve got him.”[Or: Beginnings and endings are funny things.]
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 137





	let's try it again

**Author's Note:**

> I want to formally apologize to my younger self who was so terrified of _It_ that it ruined clowns forever. I have now subjected that poor child to too much Pennywise in the name of Richie and Eddie's True Love. 
> 
> This is dedicated to everyone whose ever wandered into a fandom they don't even belong to because they heard there were gays there.

It starts like this:

Everything fucking hurts so much the pain fries all the remaining circuits in his brain and he thinks _fuck that clown_ and _Richie_ and then there is nothing.

He floats.

There’s a memory, faded and frayed as the hem of his mother’s favorite flannel house gown, pink rosebuds bleached grey from so many cycles through boiling hot water, of bodies, dozens of bodies caught like leaves on the wind, and Eddie thinks he’s one of them now.

But there’s no weightlessness to this feeling, its heavy, leadened, like a fiberglass cast fixed around a broken bone, always heavier than Eddie expected.

He thinks of Stan and wonders if this is what the water felt like, holding him down even as he let go and his heart aches. No everything aches, from every last strand of hair on his head to the perfectly kept nails on his toes.

He’s dying. Eddie knows he is.

_Fuck that clown_. He thinks. Then: _I was brave, Rich_.

-

This is how It ends:

They make It small, as small as they felt when they were first its victims, as small as they felt when they set foot back in Derry. As small as they felt all those years they spent alone.

Mike cracks It’s rotten heart in his hands and Richie could care less that the hellscape under Derry is crumbling all around them, he’s not leaving Eddie here, not alone, and if the others don’t agree they can leave him too. He’s done forgetting.

Mike and Bill grab him, haul Richie to his feet and Eddie flops, limp and motionless onto the dirty stone and there’s so much blood sticking Richie’s jacket to the hole in his chest, and Richie yells, he screams, he pulls and pulls against their arms.

“I’ve got him, Rich. I’ve got him.” And then Ben’s crouching and picking Eddie up like he weighs nothing, and Eddie’s head lolls like it isn’t properly attached at the neck and Richie sags, knees going to jelly so suddenly it takes all of Mike and Bill’s strength for them not to hit the ground together. “I’ve got him.” Ben says again, and Bev is still crying but she’s telling them to follow her, she knows the way out and Mike and Bill are moving, half-carrying half-dragging Richie between them as all around them Neibolt falls down.

-

It probably actually starts like this:

The kid sitting across from his has too much hair, just growing all over the place, the kind of boy Mommy would save doesn’t have anyone to take care of him, no one who cares about what kind of impression he makes (“You’re lucky Eddie-bear, to have a mommy who loves you so much.” She always says, combing his hair smooth and fixing his collar even after he’s already checked twice). His glasses are smudged from where he keeps pushing them up and he talks with his mouth full, bits of chip flying everywhere when he laughs at what Bill says.

Eddie likes Bill, he’s tidy and smart and his parents always say hello to his mom and him when they run into each other at church. This new boy, Richie, that’s his name, isn’t anything like Bill, blinking at Eddie from behind his thick-framed glasses and asking him if he’s going to eat his cupcake. “It’s for dessert.” Eddie tells him, covering his cupcake with his hand in case he tries to grab it.

Richie snorts and shoves an entire Oreo in his mouth. “Live a little Eds.” He says, slightly crooked teeth dotted with black cookie crumbs. No manners, Mommy would say, and Eddie opens his mouth to say something about chewing with his mouth closed, but then Richie is sliding his last Oreo towards Eddie.

He still thinks Richie’s gross, but he’s pretty nice too.

-

This is how It ends them the first time:

Richie hugs Eddie tight and tells himself not to cry, he’s not a total pussy, but no amount of silent bullying can keep his glasses from fogging up when Eddie’s arms circle around him just as tightly and squeeze him back.

“I’ll call.” Eddie promises, but that’s what everyone’s said and no one ever does, and Richie hates it, he fucking hates it, but he never thought it was Eddie he’d have to let go. “Richie, I’ll call. Mom can’t guard the phone all the time.” He says it like the determined little shit he’s always been, even with his fanny pack and inhaler, and Richie nods, because for once his voice is locked up inside his chest and he doesn’t know how to get any of it out without throwing up everywhere.

He knows Mrs. K probably isn’t really doing this to ruin his life. Eddie mentioned something about one of his aunt’s being sick and how his mom wants to go help and that’s why they’re moving, but Richie can’t shake the memory of Sonia’s round face, her little suspicious eyes, the way her mouth had puckered like she’d been force fed a whole pail of lemons the morning a few months back when she caught Richie in Eddie’s room one morning, squeezed in besides her son in his twin sized bed.

They hadn’t even been doing anything, just the thought of the possibility makes Richie feel like his stomach might fall out of his butt. They’ve shared a bed a hundred times, and maybe Eddie was right when he said—all red faced and awkward a few hours later—that seventeen was probably too old for little kid stuff like that. _Fuck growing up_, Richie thought, but he couldn’t argue without admitting he liked waking up smashed up against Eddie, his boney knees poking Richie in the gut, his skinny legs tangled over Richie like he wasn’t sure how close he really wanted him.

He hugs Eddie closer and knows that any second now Eddie’s going to tell him to get the fuck off him, like when they were kids and Richie would pull him into headlocks or give him wet willies. But Eddie just sniffs loudly and holds Richie back.

Richie thinks that if anyone can understand the greedy pull to keep a single person all to yourself it’s Sonia Kaspbrak. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that the person they both want to hog is Eddie.

“You better fucking call.” Richie chokes out, and Eddie nods against his cheek, skin soft and unblemished and Richie doesn’t know how to let go, his arms don’t want to let go. He feels like if he drops them he’ll lose Eddie forever and ever and never get him back.

“Yeah, Rich, I’ll call. Promise.” And Richie knows Eddie means it, he can feel it in his bones, can feel it like the raised scars that cut across both their palms, some childhood oath neither of them can clearly remember making. “I’ll call.”

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t.

Richie carries the feeling of being forgotten with him long after he’s forgotten himself.

-

No, wait, it starts here:

Eddie wakes up and he already knows what to expect. It’s the same every day. There’s Ben and Bev sleeping against one another on the couch that doubles as a guest bed, and Bill is taping away at his computer, the glow of the screen casting a pale light on his face as he types. Mike isn’t here, but he’ll come by later, he usually does after dealing with whatever he has to do to tie up loose ends and move on with his life.

And then there’s Richie, sitting next to Eddie’s bed, reading a beat up issue of _National Geographic for Kids_. There’s a black panther on the cover, something about how big cats are more like house cats than you think. Eddie thinks about how he always wanted a pet growing up, but Mom always insisted she, and then he, was allergic.

Myra doesn’t like animals.

He watches Richie read for a minute, the way his forehead wrinkles with what’s probably equal parts age and concentration, his hair standing up all over the place like he’s run his hands through it a hundred times. His lips are chapped and his skin looks greasy, stubble bordering on beard territory.

He looks terrible, really and truly in need of a shower, he always pushes it until even the orderlies who cycle through Eddie’s room on a regular basis can’t take it and tell him to use the ensuite bathroom that’s technically just for patients. But Eddie’s a far way’s off from getting to use it, he’s still pissing into a bag for Christ’s sake, so he figures its okay if Richie’s using it.

Eddie should find it more off putting than he does, Richie coming back to his bedside seat dripping wet and wearing days’ old clothing, smelling of that sharp almond scent so many of hospital grade soaps have, but he mostly likes not being alone for longer than he has to be.

After a minute, Richie looks up like he knows he’s being watched and Eddies watches this part too, the way his face brightens with a grin as he leans forward with a happy, “Hey, Eddie Spaghetti!” It’s probably one of the dozens of meds pumping through his system that’s responsible for the flippy-flopping feeling behind his navel, but Eddie only ever feels it in moments like this, when Richie’s attention is pinning him in place, holding him so fast there’s not even the slightest possibility that Eddie will float away.

“You doing the Funny Fills without me?” Eddie croaks, his voice still sandpaper thin even though they took that tube out of his throat weeks ago. Bill’s typing has fallen silent, which means he’s probably watching them but he doesn’t say anything, and Eddie’s oddly grateful, doesn’t think he could stand it if he had to divide his attention right now. It’s always been easy to look at Richie, even when they were young and all Eddie could hear in his head was his mother warning him about dirty boys who did bad things to themselves. Richie’s rambling was almost always loud enough to drown her out.

And just as before, Richie shines under Eddie’s attention, the tension in his face easing into something less afraid, the laugh lines around his eyes creasing a little deeper as he looks Eddie in the eye.

“Without you,” he says, fishing a ballpoint pen out his pocket, “Nah, Eds, never.”

-

This is how he ends it:

The audience goes so quiet he swears he can it the electricity in the air. He squints up at the lights and wishes he could turn them off, dim them, hide in the wings and never come back out. It’s not his first night back since the whole ‘fucking up his entire career’ fiasco but it’s probably his biggest venue since and his first trying out his own material and damn, Tony is definitely going to be pissed because Richie didn’t even run this one by him.

He threw up twice before he even arrived tonight and he definitely wishes he were a fuckton more drunk than he is right now, which is sadly, not drunk at all, but he didn’t want to fuck this up and God, help him—

Someone in the front row starts to clap and someone to the left whistles, one of those big wolf whistles that should come with a horn, and then there’s more applause and Richie’s heart still feels like it’s about to explode but it isn’t, it’s still whole, still beating away behind his ribs.

“Yeah, growing up I used to make an indecent amount of jokes about fucking my best friend’s mom, but that was just because I knew even then that jokes about how much I wanted to bang his dead dad were crude, y’know? Like I wasn't raised in a barn for fuck's sake.” 

Richie powers through the next half hour, wanders off the stage and feels like he’s going to puke a third time and then does, right into a cooler of chilled waters. He apologizes profusely to the poor PA whose probably going to be stuck cleaning up after him and shoves his card at someone else to go buy a fuckload of new waters from the bar.

He goes to the bathroom and pulls his phone out of his pocket, stares down at the last text conversation he left opened.

** _Eduardo:_ ** _ You’re braver than you think. _

He thumbs the small phone icon at the top right hand of the screen and a picture of Eddie, sweaty and red-faced but standing all on his own at his last PT session fills the screen as the call goes through.

It’s late but Eddie still answers on the second ring. “Bonjour!” His voice pops with tiny burst of static, the music from the club outside vibrating in the bathroom tiles and Richie wants with every fiber of his being to close his eyes and miraculously find himself back in Maine. (A thought no living human being has ever thought, he’s sure.)

“Fuck you, I told you my set was in English.”

“Pardon.” Eddie answers, and its so obvious he’s enjoying himself that Richie almost doesn’t give him shit for still remembering bullshit from sophomore French. Almost.

“Va te faire foutre,” Eddie drawls and Richie might not speak the language of love but he knows this one, snorts into the phone and manages, “Va-te fair fo-truh you too buddy.”

Eddie’s laughter sounds like someone’s stuck him with a livewire, ugly and loud in Richie’s ear, he’s practically braying, but Richie smiles at himself in the dingy club mirror, soaking in the sound.

“How’d it go? Eddie asks, a little breathless still, and Richie is grateful he didn’t ask if he really did it, like maybe Eddie’s believed he could really do it all along.

“They didn’t throw tomatoes.” Richie answers, studying the mildew pattern growing in one of the cracked bathroom tiles. Eds would have a heart attack here.

Tony’s been calling this a soft relaunch after the debacle that was Richie’s last big show, reintroducing Richie slowly after his almost year long hiatus. Richie’s conditions that he never be farther than a day from Maine has thrown real wrench into the gears but they’re making it work. Mostly.

“Dude, it’s been a weird ass year.” Richie says, breathing out slow and long, like Doctor Kabe says your supposed to. He thinks of Ben and Bev in love and thriving in it, Bill fixing his shit endings, Mike traveling the great United States and already talking about getting a passport and seeing what else is out there. He thinks of Eddie, a hole in his chest that just narrowly missed his heart. Eddie calling him brave.

“Don’t call me _dude_, Richard. We’re over forty.”

Richie pinches his nose, jostles his glasses out of place, “Yeah. Wow. When the fuck did that happen?”

There’s something pinching in his chest and he doesn’t even know what the fuck that’s about, because he’s supposed to be happy right now, talking to Eddie and officially _out_. It’s growing, and he imagines a dozen spiders with spindly sharp legs, ripping him up from the inside, and he sucks in a deep breath, forces air into his lungs so consciously he thinks he can actually feel every molecule entering his chest.

Eddie says his name, worried, and Richie shakes his head like an idiot because Eddie can’t see him, tries to tell him he’s alright, just needs a minute, just a minute to get his shit together, because everything is fine, nothing bad happened, everything is fine.

“Hey, Rich, Rich, Richie, it’s okay. It’s okay.” Eddie keeps saying and Richie doesn’t even know when he sat down on the filmy tiled floor, oddly stained and dirtiest in the corners, he just knows he needs to focus on getting each lungful of air into his chest.

“I meant it you know?” Eddie’s saying, “You’re braver than you think. It takes balls to share that part of yourself with people, Richie, it does. You could have spent the rest of your life never telling anyone who didn’t know you—fuck you didn’t even have to tell us, y’know, you didn’t have to tell us, but you did and you told them tonight and now—you’re not hiding anything Rich. You can be yourself the way you’ve always been, just, like more. And that’s great. That’s a great fucking thing.”

Eddie keeps rambling and Richie keeps breathing.

He doesn’t feel brave, but he’s alive, he feels alive.

-

This is how something starts:

He’s never seen the Pacific Ocean, so the first thing Richie does after they land is announce that he’s driving them towards the beach.

“Do you know how much bacteria lives in sand? I might as well stick my feet in Teela’s litter box.”

“Please, we both know you keep that thing cleaner than most restaurant kitchens.” Richie says, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel in an annoying rhythmless beat.

As if hearing her name, Teela meow’s plaintively from her prison in the backseat and Eddie reaches backward to stick his fingers in the gaps in the door keeping her trapped in her carrier. Her big green eyes stare at Eddie as she sniffs his fingertips, like she knows he’s responsible for her current predicament and she won’t soon forget. She was perfectly fine in Chicago.

“Ugh, don’t say that.” Eddie sighs, tired and cranky from hours on an airplane, worrying about Teela in her carrier even if the special stickers on her carrier meant she could ride under his feet rather than down below with the luggage. “We can do the beach tomorrow, if we must. I really want to let her out.”

“Sure, sure, no problema.” Richie says, half-distracted as he switches lanes without ample signaling, but Eddie must be too tired to properly chew him out, resting his head back on the seat and closing his eyes. The start-stop traffic makes his dizzy, so he lets himself doze instead, opening his eyes when the car stops and Richie’s hand is squeezing his knee.

“Hey, Eds, c’mon man, I can’t carry you and the cat.”

He opens his eyes and blinks, foggy with half-sleep and momentarily lost. It’s the same apartment building he’s seen online a hundred times, nothing new or particularly special about it. It’s different from the brownstone Eddie called home back in New York, nothing narrow or dark about it.

Richie opens the carrier door before the apartment door is even shut behind them, Teela taking off like a bat out of hell. She scopes the place out, and Eddie watches her fluffy gray tail bob as she turns a corner. 

“Mi casa es su casa.” Richie says, hands shoved in his pockets and shoulders rounded forward like he’s trying to shrink to some more acceptable size. Eddie wants to roll his eyes because there’s reason to be nervous, not when they’ve already been “living in sin” (as Richie lovingly calls it) for months now, sharing a miniscule studio off Halsted while they figured out where they were going to go next.

Myra said a lot of men suffer a midlife crisis and that Eddie wouldn’t be any different when he realized he was making a mistake. That was long ago now, back when Eddie first brought up divorce and going their own separate ways. There’s been a part of him—small and terrified, the same part that still reached for an inhaler he never really needed, that makes him double check under his nails when he washes his hands–that’s been afraid she was right.

Most people don’t upend their whole lives at forty-one.

Maybe more people should though, Eddie thinks, listening to the soft chime of Teela’s collar as she explores her new home. He turns more fully towards Richie, still waiting, still watching him, even after all this time, like he’s also waiting for Eddie to decide he’s made a mistake. Eddie’s chest still hurts sometimes when he moves a certain way, and the scar on his cheek healed uneven and brown, and sometimes he can still smell his mother’s cold cream, feel her soft wrinkled hands on his face, telling him there’s so much to be afraid of.

He’s done being afraid of this though, done letting the fear of what he doesn’t know and the fear of what he thinks he knows stop him from trying to be happy.

“How do you say our house?” he asks, and Richie pretends to think, overly pensive expression on his face. “I think it’s… _no fucking clue_.”

Eddie laughs and Richie’s shoulders loosen, his hands extracted from his pockets. “I could google it.” He says, something hopeful in his voice. Eddie nods, reaches up and pulls Richie down, still delighted every single time Richie comes without protest. He kisses him and loves that too, the freedom to do it and the way Richie’s hands go to his waist like that’s where they’re meant to go.

“Don’t strain yourself.” Eddie teases, and Richie makes a noncommittal noise against his cheek, but his hands are gentle at Eddie’s hips, holding him steady.


End file.
